[269] Dr. Hawks, in his History of North Carolina, ii. 463-483, gives a detailed and very entertaining account of the Culpeper rebellion, to which I am indebted for several particulars.
[270] Hawks, op. cit. ii. 489.
[271] Rivers, Early History of South Carolina, p. 145.
[272] Id. p. 153.
[273] Records of General Court of Albemarle, 1697; Hawks, op. cit. ii. 491.
[274] Spotswood’s Official Letters (Va. Hist. Soc. Coll.), Richmond, 1882, i. 106. Several other passages in Spotswood’s letters of the summer and autumn of 1711 express a similar belief. The opinion of Spotswood is adopted in Hawks, History of North Carolina, ii. 522-533, who is followed by Moore, History of North Carolina, i. 35. I am glad to find that my opinion of the inadequacy of the evidence is shared by so great an authority as Professor Rivers, in Winsor, Narr. and Crit. Hist. v. 298.
[275] See the learned essay by James Mooney, The Siouan Tribes of the East (Bureau of Ethnology, Bulletin 22), Washington, 1894. Until recent years it was not known that there were ever any Sioux in the Atlantic region. The Catawbas, etc., were supposed to be Muskogi.
[276] Lawson, The History of Carolina; containing the Exact Description and Natural History of that Country; together with the Present State thereof. And a Journal of a Thousand Miles travelled through several Nations of Indians, giving a particular Account of their Customs, Manners, etc. London, 1709, small quarto, 258 pages.
[277] For this and other atrocities see the letter of November 2, 1711, from Major Christopher Gale to his sister, printed in Nichols’s Illustrations of the Literary History of the Eighteenth Century, iv. 489-492.
[278] In Professor Rivers’s version of the story there was either no general conspiracy or only a sudden one conceived after the murder of Lawson. He suggests that “being fearful of the consequences” of that act, the Indians “were hurried into the design of a widespread massacre,” etc. Early History of South Carolina, p. 253. It may be so. Questions relating to concert between Indian tribes are apt to be hard to settle. I think, however, that in this case the simultaneity of attack at distant points is in favour of the generally accepted view of a conspiracy arranged before Lawson’s death.